Fire Phone’s Firefly can recognize 100 million different items

Fresh off the stage today comes the announcement of Amazon’s new service called Firefly. It’s the ultimate item recognition app. You point your camera to anything that intrigues you and it gives back meaningful information about it.

Amazon Firefly has a dedicated hardware button on the side of Amazon’s new Fire phone.

Firefly would almost instantly recognize anything you point the camera to. Stuff such as labels, adverts, ordinary text, phone numbers, email addresses, products, the currently playing music or TV show and fine art. The whole processing and matching against the various databases is done in the Amazon cloud and not on the phone itself.

Firefly comes with an SDK, which is immediately available as well. It would allow third-party developers to integrate their databases into Firefly so it can retrieve related product info – such as nutritional information, specifications and whatnot.

Firefly comes built inside the Amazon Fire phone, but so far it’s not clear whether it will be available on the Fire tablets, though I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that especially since the secret juice is the processing on the Amazon cloud servers and not something specific to the phone.